External Costs as Competitiveness Factors for Freight Transport — A State of the Art

ABSTRACT

External costs have been a key issue in the last years of transport research. In Europe, this trend is in line with the political willingness to internalize externalities in transport pricing policies. This paper has two purposes. It first identifies the recent work achieved in the field of external costs of road and intermodal freight transport, where each paper is assessed in terms of its perspective (academic or project oriented), its objective (prescription, application, projection), the type of externality (air pollution, climate change, noise, accidents, congestion) and the type of cost (marginal, average, total) that is considered. The literature review reveals a gap in the development of generic mathematical functions for external costs of transport. The second objective of the paper is thus to highlight the usefulness of such functions by identifying the main parameters that influence freight transport competitiveness in terms of external costs, and by determining which of these parameters should be incorporated in further research works.

KEYWORDS:

• Freight transport
• externality
• transport competitiveness
• road transport
• intermodal transport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Martine Mostert acknowledges the financial support of FRS-FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique). The project leading to the presented results was partially supported by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office, Comex [grant P7/36]. The paper, however, only expresses the view of the authors.